Tuesday, 29 November 2016

After taking the best part of a fortnight to cast another batch of wagon kits to resupply our friends at Narrow Planet I've been able to resume work on 125.

Unfortunately, for the purposes of this blog, what I've been doing is not visually spectacular.

Firstly, I have drilled the holes for the bogie locating bolts.

This doesn't sound like the pinnacle of railway modelling achievement, I appreciate, but you must see this in the context of the humiliating experience of discovering that on my last carriage (Observation car 150) I managed to drill them off-centre to the extent that it fouled the walls of the cutting under the bridge on Dduallt.

So this time I did this routine task very carefully indeed!

I have also added on the skirt which represents the very prominent frame that the Superbarns are built on.

This one is more complex than the others because it includes the cut in on the clock side for the staff access doorway and an alternation on the engine side to allow for the doors on the generator compartment.

This is the most boring bit of carriage building - it will get more interesting, I promise.

Sunday, 27 November 2016

Fitting proper-sized modern FR bogies to all the modern carriages is going to be a long-term project, but Himself has begun with one of the carriages that shows them off to advantage - Stefco's one-off 122.

These are the bogies we make up with brass frames etched by Narrow Planet, fitted with 'top hat' bearings which then have resin castings with the axle box and suspension detail fixed on top.

So far we have them fitted beneath all the Superbarns, the rebuild of prototype 116 and a couple of the most recent Barns I've made to replace to older models.

Wednesday, 23 November 2016

Just like with the Welsh Highland carriages Bodysgallen and Glaslyn, Himself will be using the waterslide sheets produced by Fox Transfers for 4mm scale standard gauge Pullman carriages which are about the closest we can get.

There have to be some compromises but they do the job well enough. Or at least we think so.

The hardest bit will be trying to replicate the very fine vertical lines on the window pillars.

Tuesday, 15 November 2016

The process of fitting the our new full-sized FR bogies to the Superbarn fleet is complete so a test run was in order.

You may remember that I've blogged previously about how we had to make some alternations to the under frames on the carriages to increase the bogie swing so they could negotiate the tighter curves on Dduallt.

They were tested being pulled and propelled around the spiral so it looks like they are fit for traffic again.

Sunday, 13 November 2016

The carriage ends are normally quite simple but 125 requires a bit more brainpower because they are not identical.

The trickiest aspect is accounting for the difference in their width.

The problem is that one end of the carriage has the vestibule doors inset as on a regular Superbarn saloon while the other is at the full width of the body.

I've had to make some calculations (and cross my fingers) to hopefully ensure that when it is all joined together the two body sides will be running parallel and it's not narrower at one end than the other.

At the point where my brain started to hurt I decided to stop theorising and just cut some styrene and see what happens....

Wednesday, 9 November 2016

The two most recently-built B wagons have been varnished and are ready for service.

Quite honestly I've begun to lose count of how many of these we have now - and the real F&WHR for that matter, too.

I think we're quite well off for this later design, which I can knock out quite easily in resin, but I suspect we have not yet got a full compliment of the other type which are built from a Worsley Works scratch-aid kit.

Rather that take a boring picture on the work bench I thought I would pose them on the section of the layout which is up in the garage at the moment for the fence post installation.

The difficulty was that - like the real location - there is a fierce gradient around our S bend and I had to resort to placing a discreet blob of Blu Tac on one of the rails as a makeshift stop block to prevent them free-wheeling into oblivion while I took the snap.

Monday, 7 November 2016

So, I plucked up the courage to slice the other side of 125 almost in two, except for a sliver of a cantrail along the top.

I won't pretend it went like clockwork.

As soon as I had removed the section of lower bodyside I decided that the gap didn't look quite big enough and I set about relocating the window pillar on the right, which was not as simple as it sounds because by this point it already had all the beading in place.

That had to be carefully peeled off before chopping out the pillar and moving it a mm or so along the way.

Satisfied, at last, with the positioning I built up a section behind and formed a doorway.

Here's how the finished side looks from the front.

And from the back you can see how far into the carriage body this doorway is set.

I shall turn my attention to the ends next, which are not identical.

For the Caernarfon end I can use a set of standard double door superbarn castings but the other, which is a regular, full-width affair, will be scratch built in styrene.

Thursday, 3 November 2016

Therefore it took only a week from him being press-ganged into purchasing some pre-loved lengths of PECO OO at the local exhibition to The Trainee being presented with his first proper train set.

Not content with a mere oval Himself has squeezed in a passing loop and a siding with headshunt.

(I should explain at this point that although he ended up sending a crate-load of plain track to the tip when he moved house last year he held on to all his old points - go figure.)

This has all be laid out on the baseboards which were used for the temporary fiddle yards when Bron Hebog was being shown as a work-in-progress at various points in recent years.

They're connected by hinges so it can be folded up and stored behind the sofa in the snug.

(How cunning, eh? Not content with an entire double garage he is now moving model railway stuff into a second room in the house!)

He's sorted out a selection of locomotives and rolling stock for The Trainee to play with which are a mix of the expendable and the indestructible - the expandable being some prehistoric Triang Mk1's which have already been vandalised once by me 30 years ago practising my carriage panting skills, and the indestructible (?) being a handful of metal Wrenn steam locomotives.

(I put the question mark in brackets because we discovered the other day that unbeknown to us one of the buffers had sheared off a Wrenn BR Standard 2-6-4 at some point in the last quarter of a century.)

The eagle-eyed my also notice the obligatory Hornby 'Caley Pug' (in mock L&Y livery) and some four wheelers.

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About Me

Broadcaster, writer and railway modeller.
Best known for the 009 Festiniog Railway layout 'Dduallt' which I built with my father David in the early 1990's and which is still making appearances on the exhibition circuit.